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Sascha Stronach
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Sascha Stronach (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka Ki Puketeraki) is an author based in Pōneke, Aotearoa.
His debut novel The Dawnhounds is a mind-bending fungal murder mystery described as 'Discworld Elysium'. If you encounter Sascha Stronach in the woods, shout and wave your arms to seem to bigger – this will intimidate the author.
Publisher: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Sascha-Stronach/184950774
Twitter: https://twitter.com/understatesmen?lang=en
Website: https://www.theunderstatesmen.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host Ken Zalante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer. Hey folks, I am here with Sasha Stronek and author reaching us from New Zealand. I'm not gonna
00:00:29
Speaker
talk too much right off the bat. I want to, I want to welcome you on a sock. It's great joy to have you on the something rather than nothing podcast. Um, yeah, no, it's, it's lovely to be on. I've kind of been listening for the back episodes and it is, it's really good to kind of get deep on
Philosophy of Art Discussion
00:00:47
Speaker
these things. I often feel a little over my head when people talk about, you know, the philosophy of art. Um, cause I, I feel like a big dumb dumb. Um, I, I'm kind of just,
00:00:58
Speaker
a middle-head kid done good, but I'll do my best. There's been a lot of metal shows on this. I veer wildly between my interests. And I think some of the things with these questions is they humble everybody. So I think it's a great leveler even for me. So like, you know, like what are we doing in this life type of thing? Yeah.
00:01:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. All we can do is kind of just take takes ones at it, right? Do obvious.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah.
The Journey of 'The Dawn Hounds'
00:01:34
Speaker
So let's talk about your work. Let's talk about The Dawn Hounds. Audience, Dawn Hounds is a recently published novel, which I am deep into. Truly unique work. And in listening and reading a little bit about Sasha, there's the book and the pieces of it have been around for a while. But in chatting about it,
00:02:02
Speaker
Sasha, just learning a little bit just about how it's preparation for introduction to an American audience, an American publisher, where I'm located in Oregon, and just how the different forms that it's taken for you. So it's been around for years. So tell us how we now, how I got my copy of the Dawn Hounds in my hand now.
00:02:26
Speaker
So I self-published it in November 2019. And I got incredibly, incredibly lucky that one of the first three or four people to read it, like I think before my parents had read it, was Tamsin Muir. And I'm still not sure how that happened, but she went on to be a huge advocate for it. It won the 2020 Best New Zealand Science Fiction Fantasy Award. And that was at WorldCom, which was in New Zealand that year.
00:02:55
Speaker
And after that was the night of the 2020 US election. And you know how it looked like Trump was winning for like the first half of the night? Sure do remember that. The first half of the day in the US, it would have been the day in New Zealand. It was like we went drinking at like 7pm and it was getting time to go to bed and Trump was winning. And I just I don't drink a lot. I actually lived in the Muslim world for a while and it annihilated my alcohol tolerance.
00:03:25
Speaker
But I got blackout drunk for the first time in my life that night and I woke up with an agent. Because it turns out that when I drink I network, which is, you know, I don't know what that says about me personally, but it's a very useful skill to have. And then yeah, we sold it as part of a three book deal to Simon and Schuster.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, four months later, it would have been March, April 2021, we closed the deal. After picking up an agent on election night, basically. And yeah, as I was saying to you before, when I self-published it, I was like, I want to sell this to Americans. And they're not going to get a lot of this, so I just watered it down. I stripped back a lot of the Tareo Māori, a lot of the Teganan Teomori, and a lot of the New Zealand slang, and then
00:04:23
Speaker
When I went to America, they're like, no, no, we want more of that. We want more of that. And I had this kind of fascinating experience where I think the typical experience of like, you know, signing with a big art, you know, the musician is doing this kind of folky stuff on the street and they sign with a big label and become this bland pop star. Yeah.
00:04:43
Speaker
And no management, we're like, no, no, no, we want it to be weirder. We like to make it more itself.
Editorial Challenges and Cultural Authenticity
00:04:50
Speaker
And I do think the version that came out last year is the version that is the most itself. And it's not just that. It's having some more proper editorial oversight has been really, really good. It was a good book that won awards without an editor. With an editor, I think it is really something special that I'm super proud of.
00:05:14
Speaker
Interesting was interesting. I had a lot of back and forths with my editor about the specific New Zealand language that would not fly with American audiences. One of the things you've noticed is like Sen, the character of Sen intentionally goes out of his way, often to speak in a bafflingly Australian way. And he is doing it to fuck with people. Like he's winding people up. He's trying to be hard to understand.
00:05:43
Speaker
And generally, Sin just got like a pass in edits, but then there was this one moment where a cat is described as a Moggy and we were going, do Americans know that word Moggy? It kind of sounds like maybe a slower or something. It was like Moggy was one of the real knockdown drag out fights of the whole editing process.
00:06:10
Speaker
just to make sure almost like the sound of it as well, even if it might not be related to another word, that it just sounds like you're saying something wrong as it translates over. That's what I liked about it, because it sounds like a nasty cat. I was like, I want this to sound like a nasty, dirty, Ellie cat. And there weren't a lot of elegant ways familiar with American English. I could think like Tomcat or Ellie cat, maybe.
00:06:40
Speaker
But they don't have the same punch to them. I think we got the updated word here now for it. Yeah, almost certainly. That was one of the fights I lost, because in editing a work like this, you picked your battles. But I think they were very generous and very good. My editor, Amara, has been really, really lovely to work with.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, the other big knockdown drag out fight which I'm 99% sure I did win eventually was there's a moment where Sen says easy as Which is a piece of news that you drop the end of some ways. Oh, yeah, that's good as sweet as yeah easy as And it got changed to easy as pie and I went no no no no no cross it out state Because easy as pie tonally is foxy and
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of a little bit kind of like, oh, gosh darn it, sweet old man. And Sam is kind of a nasty piece of shit. Well, I love him. He ended up being one of my favorite characters in the book. But he is meant to be a bit more of a kind of slightly rough around the edges kind of guy.
00:08:02
Speaker
And then it went to copy and they changed it to easy as pie. This has been stated for a reason. Okay, I'll cut it out. And then it went to proof and they changed it to easy as pie. That's why, by the way, there is the author's note at the start of that New Zealand slang. I think that was the compromise. I read that at the beginning and I knew there was a backstory for you.
00:08:30
Speaker
Well, because so what happens is if people dig a book for having typos in Amazon, it can get deranged, like it can make it disappear from sales pages. And this is a piece of New Zealand slang to some American readers looks like an error. Gotcha. And I guess I thought a lot in the rewrite process about how you stay authentic to the voice that you're trying to portray. While
00:09:01
Speaker
like being comprehensible like and then while navigating like sales algorithms which were built to accommodate a even a slightly non-standard variant of English. I mean I do find you know I'm a Kiwi and I grew up speaking New Zealand English and so it's just very easy to understand for me. I've come to understand over the past few years a lot of Americans have trouble with it if you actually
00:09:29
Speaker
um go deep into the weeds and it was always i mean the thing i've noticed is when something is a little bit different that's a problem when something is really different it's fine um there's a really really wonderful essay uh called the uncanny valley of culture by oh yeah i'm sorry no no your uh former tech writer you know
00:09:59
Speaker
OK, well, they're not listing their surname on the medium, which is annoying. A games writer called Damon, who's an Aussie writing about the uncanny valley of culture. We are, yeah, if it's a little bit different from what Americans are expecting, it gets written as an error or totally dissonant or like bad writing. Yeah. And if like if I include Tareo Māori,
00:10:26
Speaker
Americans are mostly fine with that. Somebody did get mad at me for pretentiously using the word tanifa instead of using the word dragon. And I know you haven't finished, but that is sort of an explicit plot point that these are not the same thing. That a tanifa is a guardian spirit, a protective spirit, and it is fierce, but it is only fierce insofar as it
00:10:52
Speaker
is is willing to safeguard what what is protection like the extent of protection. Yeah, something. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, this book has a lot of people who are trying to navigate that space of how to look after people and not always succeeding at it. Gotcha. Yeah. And so I mean, that that to me was the big central conflict of the thing was like,
00:11:19
Speaker
Dragon is generally something destructive something the hoarding and a tonify is kind of nurturing is And trying to get from one to the other Was really what I was writing the book of that and then somebody was like just use the word dragon. Don't be pretentious Still trying to get it, right? You know, you're still just you know, the words are just so so so deeply important, you know what I wanted to ask you Sasha's
Cultural Influences and Personal Inspirations
00:11:49
Speaker
the background within tech that I read about. And I see within your work, of course, technology, but it's almost like sentience and transmission of consciousness and the idea around fungal life, different ways of transmitting. There's something like
00:12:13
Speaker
like earth tech and I'm sorry if I'm like clumsy with my words but like there's something like within how you create that world it's like so imbued with that but through the through the land or or something do am I getting at it yeah no no I think and there is
00:12:35
Speaker
One of the big, so the first version of it I wrote in 2013, and it was a pretty straightforward kind of place book, and then all of the mushroom stuff came later, and all the mushroom stuff came later when I was on this journey to reconnect with my bakpapa Maori, my Maori heritage. And the connection of the people with the land,
00:12:56
Speaker
is a really core part of that. I went back to the place where my mother I like the tribal kind of HQ is a couple of weeks ago, actually, and just being on that earth felt really healing and made me feel really connected with the people around me and people in my past. And that kind of crashed into the fact that, yeah, I'm really interested in hacking and my dad's an electrical engineer and I inadvertently created a magic system that works like
00:13:26
Speaker
circuitry, but with life energy. That's people who have been confused. Oh, you haven't got to the ending. But there is a moment where the big moment, it just works exactly like circuitry. Like all of the fungal and all of the magic and all of the tech stuff combines to make a functioning circuit. Wow. And I guess it was hybridizing that. Like when I am struggling to write, I go and find a big tree.
00:13:56
Speaker
And I just kind of vibe with it for a while. The big inspiration for the mushroom thing was I was living in Indonesia about an hour south of Sotobaya when Mount Caled erupted. And I woke up, I remember the surreal day where I looked out the window and it was black and white. And I went, I'm dreaming, I'm going back to sleep. And then I got back up later and realized it was volcanic ash.
00:14:23
Speaker
And then I looked at my bedside table and a mushroom had just punched right up through the floorboards and through the bedside table overnight. Yeah. It had clearly moved with considerable velocity for a plant. Yeah. And that was fascinating to me. And, you know, I went and read a lot about mycology.
00:14:54
Speaker
I've been reading recently a lot about traditional milder uses for mushrooms. There's one mushroom that when dried will burn, sorry, will smolder without burning for an extremely long time. And so if you need to move a campfire from place to place, like over like a day or two, you can smash that in and go for a walk.
00:15:20
Speaker
I mean, mushrooms are endlessly fascinating. People are really, really surprised that I neither eat nor take mushrooms. And I think it is because I know too much about them to ever put them in my mouth. Yeah, I am. I'm in this position right now, Sasha, being real here that as you're telling me about this, you know, I'm
00:15:43
Speaker
running the interview ostensibly, but I'm dropping into your description. I'm very connected, ever since I was a little kid, to volcanoes, the event. I'm from the east coast of the United States, industrial city, old industrial city, kind of run down mills and stuff like that.
00:16:05
Speaker
But I'm out in Oregon now on the other coast with mountains and Crater Lake is the largest
00:16:16
Speaker
depth lake in out in this like North America And it's a caldera, you know the top blew off It was Mount Mazama and just filled up like 3,000 feet of water. I like I became so fascinated by The color of the water when they used to process the photographs and send them to the Kodak printing company they used to send them back in set apologize for misprocessing the
00:16:45
Speaker
Photos because the blue was so fantastic. They thought it was miss processing, but it was just the characteristics of The caldera and they did this for years And so and so anyways I one other final thing Mount st. Helens blew up out in this part of the US and in 1980 I was a young kid. I was I was in
00:17:10
Speaker
Vancouver in 97 and I remember people still talking about it still talking about yes, so it was it was that but I just had this strong so when I've encountered those elements and just you know, looking at your work in you talking about this I never thought about the potential of wake the outcropping of what could immediately happen with that immense energy. I know nothing. I'm completely ignorant. It's gonna be fun and I'm not allowed to talk about it.
00:17:44
Speaker
I've been reading up a lot on radiation, I think I'm allowed to say that, but yeah, the way energy and heat and waves interact is pretty central to that, like that immense power that is available under the Earth. Yeah, the book is called The Sun Forge, if that gives you an idea of how much we are going into heat
00:18:13
Speaker
Yeah. As a big kind of central thing. Yeah, I mean, volcanoes. I mean, because, you know, you're in Oregon right now. I'm in New Zealand. We're both on the ring of fire. Right. Like this entire land is shaped by that. And if you come to New Zealand, it's very tectonically and geologically new.
00:18:37
Speaker
You go to places that raised up out of the earth or places that haven't tectonically moved in thousands of years. And there's kind of like a rolling, they're rolling flat plains and New Zealand is jaggy. New Zealand is all kind of little spiky, broken teeth. It's really hard not to live here and not understand the land in that kind of slightly eruptive way.
00:19:08
Speaker
I mean, you can always spot when an American comes to New Zealand, you know, they're from the west coast. If when an earthquake happens, like how they respond to it, I've noticed because you get like a lot of American and British and like professors from overseas at uni. And whenever there would be an earthquake, if then from like New York or London or something, they will freak out and they will stop, drop and roll.
00:19:36
Speaker
And everyone who's from Cali or whatever, or New Zealand, will just kind of sit there and go, oh, is that like a 4.1? Oh, that was a long one. Just riding it out until. I mean, if it's actually big, people will do the stuff. But I think you kind of become accustomed to your like twos through to your kind of vibes just being
00:20:05
Speaker
a thing that happens sometimes, and it's like, it's an eventful part of the day that everyone's talking about around the watercolor. Well, you're talking about that reaction. I just wanted to, before asking you another question, I want to mention one thing about, I moved to the Midwest and I had never seen tornadoes, speaking of kind of cataclysm and energy.
Geological Impact on Culture
00:20:29
Speaker
I had never ever seen them in my life, and it was the same type of thing where
00:20:34
Speaker
Um, a tornado for me when I first saw them, not very close, but knew of the experience was crystallized instant death. Like to me, it was so powerful if you and tornado next to each other, no more you and.
00:20:52
Speaker
just as power. And it was the same type of thing where like being around Midwesterners who'd be like, they see the tornado for me, which is like, you know, the gates of hell a mile and a half away. And they're like, that's not, it's not catching. It's not rotating like it needs to be if it's, you know, I'm like, no, no. See, I've, I have never seen a tornado. And I think if I went to the Midwest, I might have your reaction. I probably would just don't like, don't like that.
00:21:22
Speaker
at all. My only contact with tornadoes is the movie Twister, which is, of course, wonderful. But yeah.
00:21:34
Speaker
I was just thinking of that. Hey, let's hit a couple of the big questions right in the middle here. With your first fully realized novel published and you've been writing in the past, talking about being an artist or being a novelist, identity wise, when did you
00:22:00
Speaker
When did you see yourself as an artist creator, Sasha? I mean, I've always wanted to be a writer. I don't know if I always wanted to be an artist creator. But mom was a journalist. And she was good school friends with the daughter of New Zealand author Joy Cowley. And I think one of my really formative moments was hanging out with Joy Cowley at her house. And she gave me a little signed book. And I was like six.
00:22:30
Speaker
And I knew that was what I wanted to do. And I kind of just fumbled at that for a very long time. And then at some point, people started calling me an artist and a creator. I started taking writing really seriously when I was 19. I got a short story published by Commonplace Books, which they do. They run Welcome to Night Vale, the podcast. This was like a year or two before Night Vale.
00:23:02
Speaker
And I went, oh, this is this is really, really cool. And everybody's kind of talking about it. And so I started I joined like a fiction group we write every week. And so I've been trying to write, you know, a piece of flash fiction a week for God, since 2009. Now 2010, when did Fallout New Vegas come out?
00:23:22
Speaker
I was the year full I knew they just came out. That was when I started. My other son who's nearby, I could run out and run back in and have the fall. Yeah, I can't recall. It would have been 2009, 2010, around then. And I look back at my old book and I cringe. I was very, very bad at it for a long time. And at some point,
00:23:53
Speaker
Like, it doesn't happen all at once, right? It's just people start calling you an artist. And you go, oh, shit, that's right. One of the first, like, I guess if there was a big revelatory moment was talking with Tamsin, who really liked the book. And I really, really liked her writing. And it was like, I don't know if I'm good, but somebody who I think is better than me thinks I'm good. So.
00:24:20
Speaker
No, I totally understand that. Yes, absolutely. And yeah, that would have been late 2019. And it's kind of just been slowly kind of building up since then. I think I have considered myself a writer since I was like 18 or 19. I consider myself an artist as of sort of 2019, 2020.
00:24:51
Speaker
I would say, if that makes sense, and I cannot articulate the difference. Yeah, and it's not necessary. Well, thanks for talking about that.
00:25:05
Speaker
You know, it is a question to ask, but I think the deeper kind of identity pieces, at least for me, about how you think about yourself and how you see yourself, whether it's painter, writer, artist, you know, by word, it's, um, it kind of changes. At least for me, it kind of changes how, when I step out into the world, it's going to go a little bit different for me with, with, with some of that vibe.
Artistry and Writing Precision
00:25:35
Speaker
I mean, a writer to me, because I do journalism work and I do editorial work and stuff like that, and to me that falls underwriting as well. Retro is very broad. Writer to me conjures a very specific image of precision. It's quite a tidy word.
00:25:56
Speaker
almost. An artist is sort of big and sprawling and colorful and writer is kind of boom, boom, boom. And I don't know why that is. My first real encounter with art that really switched me on was like Rambo and Ted Berrien and John Ashbury, like these very like surreal poets who kind of existed in this
00:26:24
Speaker
I don't know if there's a single term for all of them. You know, Bergen's a bait and Rambo and Ashbury I heard once called homosexual, which I really like that the way that queer writing often has to cipher itself because queer desire is marginalized and targeted. And so there is this art of saying without saying, which often captures itself in this
00:26:53
Speaker
quite dense, metaphorical, deeply layered, colorful language. That was the first art that really switched me on, and that was where the space I emerged from, but I consider myself, I think, more of a writer and more of a technician than an artist.
00:27:18
Speaker
I do have synesthesia, which is much less exciting than a lot of people think it's going to be. But one of the ways I write is I paint that the color is in my head, is how I've articulated it. Across those teen years writing flash fiction, the one thing that I wanted to do was take the
00:27:42
Speaker
what is basically static, what is basically random neurological firings of color and sound, and translate that into something comprehensible to other people. So I think I write in a more painterly way. I write in this quite loose, creative way, but I don't know. I still very much consider myself a writer because to me, writing is the art of precision. And I came from this
00:28:12
Speaker
like a flashback and poetry, which every single word counts and you can, you can micromanage and you can be incredibly surgical. And I try to do that at macro scale. Um, in, in my novels, it's not always possible. Um, sometimes a book just needs connective tissue. Sometimes a book just needs you to move from A to B. But like that, that, that precision, I think is one of the things that I really, really value and that is,
00:28:41
Speaker
writer-like precision. So, you know, I guess I try to be an artist in the way that I weave color and I try to be a writer in the way that I pin it down. Does that make sense? It does. And I think, here's my go at it because I was thinking visually and thinking about the words. I would say this, I totally hook on to what you're saying as the writer's word of a more
00:29:11
Speaker
techne, a more craft, a more like that ability. But here's the thing, when you were mentioning, when you mentioned the color in the painting, I can't correlate that at this moment talking to you about with what I've read in your words, but what I can tell you
00:29:30
Speaker
Is I see all the color right here in my head of what was constructed I don't have the connection back between them But when you were talking about the painting and that I was like, of course that's what you were doing Even though I didn't know that you were I can see it and I can see the color Yeah, no, it is that Trying to cage fire, you know, but trying to take something that is incredibly abstract and make it incredibly concrete and and
00:30:00
Speaker
you know, you're packing a lot of vibrancy and strangeness into words, which are ultimately just, you know, pencil scratches and mouth sounds. I love it. I mean, because my my degree is in linguistics. And you know, I was always kind of fascinated by the idea of signed and signified. Do we do we? Oh, yeah. Should we go over that for the listeners? Sure. I'd love to. It'd be quite helpful.
00:30:26
Speaker
So the way I've always done this is I'm going to say a word and I want you to close your eyes and I want you to picture it. And listeners do this as well. The word is cat. Now, did you picture a tiger? No. Nope.
00:30:49
Speaker
A tiger is a cat, but everybody is kind of picturing the same thing, this core idea of cat-ness. And so the sign is like the sound cat. The phonemes cat, the way your tongue and your lips and your teeth move. And the signified is the physical thing. And then what that physical thing is, is going kind of very wildly from person to person, but not very that much, even when it could.
00:31:19
Speaker
When I say imagine cat, nobody imagines a lion. Unless they're trying to be smug and difficult right now listening to the episode. You or I might, you or I might do that, but, you know, there's a smaller percentage. But like, basically everybody, you know, the colors might be different, but everybody kind of pictures a house cat of approximately the same size that kind of makes a noise a little bit like, and it's got most of its fur and it probably has two eyes and four legs and a tail. Um,
00:31:49
Speaker
And it's kind of incredible that cat, the sound can encapsulate the breadth of that and everybody just gets it. Yeah. Right. I say cat, you imagine the animal. And to me, art, if we're going to talk about the philosophy of art, like what it is in the nitty gritty is that the story does not come from me or you. The story is this like alchemy that happens between us.
00:32:21
Speaker
that it is your experiences and your interpretation meeting my articulation. And there is only a certain number of ways that it can be interpreted because words mean things. But also words are kind of fragile and easy to break.
00:32:46
Speaker
One of the aphorisms I come back to a lot in my art is that X, whatever, language, form, genre should be a playground and not a prison. And I try to fuck around with that relationship between reader and writer, between what words I'm writing and what's in their head to create hooks, to create kind of little
00:33:16
Speaker
jaggy interesting moments that stay with you. Um, because I, I want to tell you a story and, and, and the story doesn't happen in my head or in your head. It happens in the empty air between us. No, sorry. I feel like I'm rambling here. No, no Sasha.
Spiritual Connections in Storytelling
00:33:44
Speaker
Um, you are this, this, this show is sort of space of where you are right here in it. Um, no, I mean, it's the, it's just the vital question without me asking is what is, what is art? And there's this interrelationship between you and I, me reading you writing. And in that space there is, because I can easily point to the painting back behind me and say, what is art? And I can describe in much more empirical ways of execution here that this is the thing.
00:34:14
Speaker
But the writing, the words or the little pieces that are etched on a paper and the hallucinations that happen in my head, you don't know what those hallucinations are. And in that space right there is the philosophy. So to answer your question, you're right in the area that we go towards. There are so
00:34:39
Speaker
Māori is an oral tradition, and there is a pretty deep storytelling tradition that gets a little bit weirder and more complicated when it comes to the page. But there are these ideas of īhi and wīhi, that there is the light, the thing that you are trying to project, and then there is the desired emotion. And you are forging a connection between these two things. It's almost like a
00:35:08
Speaker
quasi-spiritual link between two people, that I am showing you my light and then you are responding to it spiritually and physically and emotionally. And it is a package deal. And I think that does work better when somebody's looking you in the eyes, but I think great novelists, and particularly, you know, great model novelists like with the
00:35:37
Speaker
really, really master that across the page, across distance. Like that forging of two people. Well, into something so strange and unnameable and intangible that then goes away, but if you've done it right, changes you both. Yeah? Yeah.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah, I'm gonna jump back too. That volcano, you said that when you woke up and you looked out and you thought you were still sleeping, you went back to sleep. When you look back out and you realize that that was the reality that was in front of you, what did you see? What was there? I heard you tell a little bit about this. I mean, what did you see then? Because it sounds spectacular compared to other experiences.
00:36:35
Speaker
So, I mean, the way I was talking about Kiwis and earthquakes, Indonesians are with volcanoes. And so by the time I went outside, there were just people in really wide broom hats with brooms just sweeping the streets. Everybody, you know, people going to work. Everybody was just being very, very casual about the fact that because we weren't in the evacuation zone.
00:37:03
Speaker
for Kalarozin, a town called Kotasei-douarjo. But it was, it was just a great big dumping of ash that covered everything. It was like a half inch. And by the time I went out it had, you know, some of it had been swept away and it had started to kind of fall off things. And so you would get these little snatches of color
00:37:32
Speaker
you would get like the leaves of a plant with like a little bit of a green tip because the ash on the tip had fallen down because it was slightly angled. You know, you would get the bricks on the road being the color of bricks, but then the gaps between them were the color of the ash because that's harder to sweep. Yeah, I remember it was still falling and all of the locals were super casual about it and I just went, okay.
00:38:01
Speaker
All right, we're we're fine. But it it. I mean, it was a surreal, surreal moment just waking up and looking at that and for a moment feeling like you are not awake. The end, you know, obviously it stuck with me and obviously features pretty gively and book to ash and fire and
00:38:32
Speaker
There is no line between us and art. It feels like an anodyne observation as an artist that living is art, that we exist in a world where we are affected by the world and then we process that world.
00:38:51
Speaker
One of my formative experiences as a poet was my poetry tutor who goes, what is poetry? And he goes, yeah, yeah. And he points outside at a tree and goes, is that a poem? And we went, yeah, yeah. And he went, no, it's a tree. And I went, OK. But trees inspire art. And it's at that place. And it's particularly these very stark, strange moments.
00:39:22
Speaker
that that i feel particularly like you know i write science fiction and fantasy which um is very stylized and kind of goes for these like very big swings in seeding um yeah it is it is moments like that where the world just very briefly gets turned upside down that influence it the most yeah i love that i love that i um
00:39:50
Speaker
I wanted to, one more thing on the volcano, I remember watching this strange Werner Herzog documentary, don't remember the name of it, but it was, um, he...
00:40:04
Speaker
brought some of his crew that, I don't know whether they willingly went along, was going towards the volcano as the island was evacuated and inhabited it for a while, and it didn't blow. But he wanted to document the dogs taken over and the island being taken over by other beings, and it didn't blow, so he put it out.
00:40:32
Speaker
Just an incredible idea. That one's tough to find. Hey, Sasha, we got to crack at another one, the big one. Why not?
Philosophical Reflections on 'Something Rather Than Nothing'
00:40:43
Speaker
Why is there something rather than nothing? God, I was looking at, you know, you sent me this question. I can never ask it at a good time. Yeah, I was looking at it going, a lot of theories, leading ones, the big bang.
00:41:00
Speaker
You know, how do you cover that? But there is something rather than nothing because we need there to be like you can get into the kind of cold physics of it a little bit if you want. But something and nothing are both very expensive terms. And I guess when we're talking about art, something to me means art and nothing to me means
00:41:30
Speaker
a lack of art. And often there is nothing. You know, A.I. art has been kind of pretty big in the discussion right now and everything we've talked about. I mean, the reason that A.I. art feels wrong to me is because it lacks all of that. But because, like, there's no person, there is no experience, there is no, like,
00:42:00
Speaker
qualia going on, you know, I also for book two, I've been reading a lot about AI, which I started reading up on in 2017 2018, and has now become a really hot topic. Yeah, I keep accidentally doing this, you do this when you write sci fi that you if you if you predict enough things, some of them come true.
00:42:24
Speaker
Well, some of them become relevant by the time the book comes out, because books take a long time to write. Do you know this idea of a Chinese room? No. So I want you to imagine there is a room. And in this room, there are perfect instructions for a human being to translate English into Chinese without speaking Chinese.
00:42:52
Speaker
And somebody slides a Chinese character under the door and the person follow, a Mandarin character under the door, the person follows the instructions perfectly and then slides the translation out back under the door. Is this person translating? Does this person understand? Peter Walt's Blind Sight is this fantastic science fiction novel, which is basically about a Chinese room writ large. Like here is this
00:43:22
Speaker
giant superstructure in space that perfectly replicates understanding but does not understand and what that actually kind of philosophically means. And to me, to bring it back, that is the nothing. The lack of understanding, the lack of connection, the lack of meaning. And something is there because we need it to be there.
00:43:52
Speaker
Because we need people in our lives because we need those moments of connection between two spirits You know This I can't remember who the fuck said it but like so we did this idea that art is the places where the chisel slipped like art is the beautifully superfluous like it is
00:44:19
Speaker
All of the things that a person does differently, not necessarily wrong, but just the things that lead them to be there are what makes it art and what helps forge that connection between two different people. And it does not always exist. And more and more, you know, where we're seeing kind of stuff like chat GPT taking off that just doesn't have it and feels to me on some level almost profane.
00:44:49
Speaker
You know, it feels like a Chinese room. It feels like a philosophical zombie. It can never be art to me because it is impossible for it to make that connection. But both, I guess that's a very convoluted answer, but both something and nothing plentifully exist.
00:45:19
Speaker
And nothing right now is winning. And that's why I think it is more important than ever to make something. Thank you. Thank you so much. I recently talked a little bit more in stuff to pin down, but the terms are enormous. And I've been talking a little bit more about
00:45:43
Speaker
nothing within the Buddhist context, which has a different meaning of the absence of inherent existence, the lack of something behind the thing. And just seeing the uses in using the terms, even using nothing as a, what they would say a soteriological purpose towards salvation, towards mental clarity, towards slight movement away from suffering.
00:46:12
Speaker
And, um, I really like talking about in that type of like, what is useful, um, in, in what's helpful in the something, as you pointed out, like in the emphasis on that. Um, I really appreciate your comments. Yeah. I mean, I, cause I lived in Malaysia and Indonesia for awhile and Malaysia in particular, there are a lot of Buddhists and I think I was quite influenced by that. And I had a lot of. You know how like, uh,
00:46:42
Speaker
Catholics who have converted in their adult life tend to be a little bit nuts and lifelong Catholics are incredibly chill often. I'm in the first category, just so you know, we're chatting here for the first time on a podcast category. A, it's all good. I grew up in Rhode Island where 90% of the people there are Roman Catholic. I met a Protestant when I was 19. I thought they said communist. I didn't know.
00:47:12
Speaker
I come from a very deep background that way. But I guess I encountered a lot of people who were raised Buddhist, and that was very different from Buddhism as I had come to understand it. And a lot of that stuff has brought me a lot of peace. The idea that suffering comes from... I don't know if this is even a Buddhist principle, but a Buddhist friend said it to me.
00:47:42
Speaker
a way that sounded, you know, he seemed to be invoking something. He said, suffering comes from trying to control the uncontrollable. And it's really important to acknowledge that some of the somethings going on, you have no power over and that's going to hurt you. If you try to take power over them and you just need to let it go, which is also part of the book is letting go of the things that you can't control.
00:48:13
Speaker
And I think there is a value in that calm. I think that is another form of nothing that I certainly value. I also think I'm just too messy to live entirely without attachment.
00:48:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's like an honest admission to that. One of the biggest breakthroughs for me within Buddhism, and really in terms of psychology, because if you look within the tradition of Buddhism, it's a deep psychology. But I think the main point is this, there's a recognition of
00:48:56
Speaker
of the suffering of the attachment. That's going to be every human, essentially, like that's going to be. But what they do is kind of then looking at and analyzing, it's like, okay, you're suffering because you're a suffering being, and then you're suffering more because you realize you're suffering being who's suffering. It's these layers that we placed on top of it. And this, it's no,
00:49:20
Speaker
It's no great promise right off the bat of salvation, but it's just saying, let's get to the fundamental lack of control, the fundamental presence of suffering and not compound it, kind of. Yeah, which has given me a lot of peace. I don't consider myself a Buddhist, but they're chill as far as I'm concerned.
00:49:48
Speaker
You know, I think that is, I think that is correct. I think I just really struggled to move towards it. Although I suppose we all do, right? That if it were easy to attain nirvana, everyone would be doing it. You know, but I'm pretty deep in the suffering. That sounds miserable.
00:50:17
Speaker
In Buddhist terms, you know, I'm pretty, I think, I'm never, I'm never ascending. You know, I'm too much of the world.
Buddhist Teachings and Personal Experiences
00:50:32
Speaker
Well, you know, it's a reality. And I would say, you know, even for myself, I've felt and suffered more lately, just the way things feel, maybe some health of folks around me, things feel that way, you know, like heavier. So I totally connect on that. And like I said, it's the aspirational piece of
00:50:58
Speaker
Discard in some of the unnecessary things, which is very difficult, you know, you would have a busy mind. I have a busy mind. So that's where the compounding and the psychology comes through. But there's some, there's some truth or some path, I think.
00:51:13
Speaker
Um, you know, uh, towards the piece. So man, wow. Something rather than nothing. Why is there? We got the, we got the weeds. We got every, we got everything going on in this. Um, uh, before I forget, um, Sasha, uh, uh,
Conclusion and Future Plans
00:51:32
Speaker
Tell folks where to find, I know you've done different things. You've done blogs, you've done your books are coming out, the Dawn Hounds. Where do people connect with that to get your stuff?
00:51:51
Speaker
I mean, you can buy the books at Barnes and Noble or at Amazon. I am an inviterate Twitter user. I keep trying to leave and it keeps sucking me back in. Keeps pulling your back in. Keeps pulling your back in. That is at Under Statesman on Twitter. That's a little joke of mine because I had a really crappy menial job in politics and so I was under Statesman.
00:52:21
Speaker
I Appreciate that I'm just plausible. Yeah, I appreciate that. I've worked in politics. Thank you for doing that And also, you know that there is the famous Kiwi understatement That's the part that's the terrible joke and my website is also just the understatement calm My website is where I post the stuff that can't get published anywhere else including blog posts
00:52:48
Speaker
I write under the name Alex Stronek for the spinoff sometimes, which is a New Zealand outlet, which you can find online. I think that's most of it. If you want a lot of my more esoteric stuff that I couldn't sell and also a bunch of trunk stories, go to theunderstatesman.com.
00:53:15
Speaker
If you want to see me ship-posting relentlessly, go to at understatement on Twitter. And of course, please buy the book, which is available wherever good books are sold. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. And on the book, folks, yeah.
00:53:35
Speaker
Definitely, definitely. If you can't get it from, buy it. If you get it from your library, ask for it from your library. I'm actually the audio version available through Audible on both sides.
00:53:51
Speaker
I'm actually a stranger. Yeah, it's such a wonderful I mean, I just adore the reading and how that was done. But I'm also reading it and listening to it at the same time. So I was going to try to communicate to you where I was in the book. And I don't think I could do it clearly. So I'm amidst the book. So yeah. But lovely, lovely recording, huh? Yeah, I love the VA. I just heard one time I was like, yeah, it's got to be Anna. It's like,
00:54:22
Speaker
I think it was really important to me that we got a Kiwi VA because I've heard New Zealand books. I've noticed voice actors who aren't from a place hit slang really hard and it sounds unnatural. Where it's like if you know the cat, the Moggy skittered past. The Moggy skittered past. Like they
00:54:49
Speaker
do this little weird emphasis on all of the slang words. And I think getting a kiwi and a kiwi who speaks terra amaori particularly was really important to
00:55:00
Speaker
make that feeling that holistic. And also she's just a fucking good VA. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Straight, straight up. That's the way good thing call out. Just like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's great performance. Amen. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Um, wow. That's all the play. You know what? You even told the folks the, you know, all the different spots. Uh, Oh, I will say, sorry, very briefly, the publisher did make a big push for Indies. So if you don't want to go to the zone or bonds and noble,
00:55:30
Speaker
It should be pretty easy to get at your local indie. That was one of the kind of big channels, I think, that we're pushing. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's the kind of book that gets hand sold. It's the kind of book that is very idiosyncratic. And if you love it, you absolutely love it.
00:55:49
Speaker
I got a good bookstore. I got a bookstore that is really doing a lot of nice things, has a lot of incredible books, browser's bookstore. It's a mere two blocks from where I live and the owners loves tapping into all the guests that I have on the show.
00:56:13
Speaker
the book will be available through browsers and if you're in Oregon or just online but I really appreciate that and it is widely available and one of the things I would say too in order to push on it for you a little bit more Sasha is
00:56:32
Speaker
Like when a series begins or when an author is beginning, for me it's so much easier for me to get like right in at the beginning than to like, with all due respect, like it's like me with the podcast. I have 180 episodes and I'm like, hey dedicated listener, you can listen for six straight days and then it will loop back again. And that's not so appealing to the common consumer as good as some of it might be.
00:56:59
Speaker
Yeah. And I will say also this planned trilogy ends. It ends quite decisively. I am writing three books and no more. Because, you know, one of the big thematic things is about letting go and endings and understanding like a death and oblivion. And yeah, no, this is this is going to a nice place, but a place that is pretty definitively over.
00:57:28
Speaker
Um, and I'm already writing a separate, but like I'm, I'm writing something totally different on the side. I have all of these other plans for future books that are just in completely different settings. Um, I don't, yeah, I want people to be able to just pick up anywhere, but right now you can, the door nouns is just starting out. You can just pick it up. It is a book that I intentionally wrote as a quote unquote standalone with series potential. That's one of the big ways you sell trilogies.
00:57:59
Speaker
these days, but it is it's going places, but it is itself a sort of closed circuit, part of a much more complex machine. But if you just want to read one book and smash it out and then never think about it again, you can also do that and get your catharsis in and out. Easy, baby.
00:58:20
Speaker
yeah well once you go in you'll be affected so by i do understand even if you just didn't want to do do the one um i gotta i gotta tell you uh sasha it's been uh really a great pleasure to talk with you and and honestly to go um to have a conversation like this uh you know in and um just really appreciate uh my ability as somebody
00:58:46
Speaker
over here as I'm experiencing this, this, this, this great work of art to, to connect with you on some things that like, I don't know, the volcanoes and stuff that I feel like in a very visceral way. So I just, I just want to tell you, I really appreciate the opportunity to, to chat with you. Um, don't know it's, it's been really, really great to come on. Um, please, please go buy my ACAB anarchist
00:59:15
Speaker
detective novel, which is also about mushrooms, deer listeners. But yeah, no, it's been lovely to come on. Did you have anything else? Did you want me to read anything? Yeah. I wanted to tell you what I had landed on, though, and I'll tell you why, and I'll just give you the backdrop. So it was at the beginning of chapter three. Yeah, yeah.
00:59:44
Speaker
So I had to fight very hard for these parts. Oh, wonderful. It was this. No, it's this part, too. There was about time and space and the joke about the fish. And I had a lot of stuff popping in my head about. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and fish and like I was just in time and space in this podcast. So that's what I was vibing on.
01:00:14
Speaker
All right. Do you want me to just do this now? Yeah, absolutely. Mate, mate, mate. Thank God I've been trying to get a clear line. You thought, hey, he just made a potato. You've got no idea. Anyway, anyway, you know me, you don't. It's hard to follow the river these days. They run back and forth and back and forth. And here's an old joke.
01:00:37
Speaker
Fisherman sits in a boat, hooks a fish. As he reels it up and up and his friends sit in a boat with him and laugh, water's fine today, he says. The fish hears this as it's hauled from the water and dumped inside the boat. The ear hear is wrong and it chokes. Its tiny lungs filling with fluid. As it drowns in the dry, it hears strange booming sounds and it thinks, what's water? Here's another joke.
01:01:00
Speaker
A fish goes down too deep and suddenly the whole world is dark and crushing. The fish here are barely even fish. It's eaten by something with too many teeth. Point is, there's a very narrow band of existence fish can survive in. Words like time and space mean very little until you come to a place where they don't matter anymore. What's water, eh? Which is to say, it's all sort of, you know, a bit fucked down here.
01:01:28
Speaker
They call this place a lot of things and none of them fit. It's hard to find words for the wordless. Like doesn't exist here. Neither does time. It's endlessly empty except it ain't. And the things that live here don't fit descriptions of anything you've ever seen or could hope to understand. They don't verb the way we verb. On the other side we call them gods. Down here they just are. It's hard to describe them when words made for tongues and teeth for a different are and is.
01:01:58
Speaker
But we gotta try. What I see, it matters. Matter will matter. Down in the darkness, something moves. It casts its shadow on the surface. A colossal eye snaps open, synapses fire in a sleeping Titan wings. It sees on the other side where things are small. A shifting of gears, a music so quiet it fights to be unheard. It looks from world to world and sees tall buildings of steel and glass empty and burned.
01:02:25
Speaker
It casts its eyes from one to the next and sees choking clouds of toxic ash, then emptiness. It sees world after world abandoned until at last it comes to a place with life. It stands and the world around it dances away, flees from its bulking, great swaths of colour and fire. It hears the rumble before an avalanche, a hiss of carbon monoxide and a block tailpipe. A single spark moving with purpose, the overture to inferno. Have you heard these words?
01:02:55
Speaker
I'm really sorry, mate, but you will. It sees a moment in the darkness so cataclysmic it would rend is from is. It sees a wave, an eruption that will echo back through the ages and into the dreams of mortals night after night, year after year until they awake, screaming about a war in heaven. There is silence, then a shadow, then from everywhere and nowhere at all, a new music rises from the deep. No, not music. The very opposite of music.
01:03:25
Speaker
A darkness come to swallow the world. An unsound spooling across heaven until nothing else remains, remained, will remain. Water, water, mash. That's a good one. That's a good one. That's a good one. Sasha, thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, no, it's been lovely. I hope that cuts into a good episode.
01:03:54
Speaker
it most certainly will and I think I'll have it out in a couple weeks just so you know the new episodes get about a thousand downloads within the first two or three days so okay it'll have some it'll have some punch to it probably all around yeah yeah and over by here so I'll keep you posted it's been a pleasure to meet you and I'll be in touch all right or
01:04:22
Speaker
Your turn. Take care. This is something rather than nothing.